GOD SPEAKS THROUGH HIS WOMEN

By EUGENE KENNEDY; Eugene Kennedy, a former Roman Catholic priest, is a professor of psychology at Loyola University of Chicago. His most recent book is ''Cardinal Bernardin,'' a biography.

Published: September 23, 1990

LEAD:
NO TURNING BACK
Two Nuns' Battle With the
Vatican Over Women's Right to Choose.
By Barbara Ferraro and
Patricia Hussey with
Jane O'Reilly.
332 pp. New York:
Poseidon Press. $19.95.

NO TURNING BACK
Two Nuns' Battle With the
Vatican Over Women's Right to Choose.
By Barbara Ferraro and
Patricia Hussey with
Jane O'Reilly.
332 pp. New York:
Poseidon Press. $19.95.

This extraordinary volume is at least three books in one. First, ''No Turning Back'' offers the antiphonated life stories (skillfully blended by the writer, Jane O'Reilly) of Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, who, while remaining Sisters of Notre Dame, struggled to argue publicly that conscientious Roman Catholics could dissent from their church's teaching against abortion. They also held fiercely that women faced with such a decision should be allowed, with an inner authority that supersedes the external authority of all-male church hierarchs, to make it for themselves.

The theological and psychological studies that had liberated them from the closed and highly controlled universe of traditional convent life were refined in the white-hot furnace of their pastoral experience with poor and abused women. Men ''in dresses,'' as Barbara Ferraro more than once characterizes clerical leaders, viewed women either too abstractly or too sentimentally to dictate their most personal moral choices for them. In October 1984 these two nuns, angered and embarrassed by the way in which the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, had - unlike the male candidates - been criticized for her position on abortion by members of the Catholic hierarchy, added their signatures to a New York Times advertisement that called for greater dialogue in the church about abortion.

This action, in which they were joined by 22 other nuns, four priests and 69 laymen, placed them on an ineluctable collision course with Vatican officials determined to make them recant or to give up their callings as nuns. This powerful story, as in every tale of Frank Capra-esque little people taking on big institutions, is the thoroughly chilled spine that gives form to the rest of the book. The reader's eye catches the flash of the sword that whistles through the air in every institutional inquisition; its dull edge does not prevent it from hacking away until it shapes the environment to its will.

Before the climactic meeting with the Apostolic Pro-Nuncio and a Vatican archbishop, the two women exhaust every possibility of mediation, especially through the Sisters of Notre Dame, the order to which they belong and which they regard as their home and protection. Their co-signers, meanwhile, find formulas through which they can make peace with the Vatican and the authors are left as the final holdouts.

The final scene of their ''dialogue'' with church officials plays as expected. The clerics seem paternal and unyielding, willing to fashion a political solution to safeguard institutional appearances and to allow the women to continue as nuns. The poignant inevitability of the nuns' choice is therefore hardly surprising. They attempted to purge the church of what they perceived to be its intrinsic male prejudice, asking far more than even the kindliest church official could possibly grant them without imperiling his own career. At the end, they are back ministering to the broken people of West Virginia's rugged mountains - beginning, as they put it, ''the first day of our entire adult lives as laywomen.''

While this book primarily absorbs the reader with its central narrative, it also serves a second function, providing a vivid social history of American Roman Catholic experience during the second half of this century. The authors tell of their own lives in the Catholic culture that, until the Second Vatican Council began to implement Pope John XXIII's bold reforms in the 1960's, was remarkably strong, stable and unquestioningly loyal to the pope, accepting of church regulations and discipline. As the writers movingly describe, their decisions to become nuns were considered signs of God's favor not only on them but on their families as well. This golden age of Roman Catholic orthodoxy was, as their own careers attest, remarkably rich in achievement and pride, a time in which conflict was often suppressed by its members and the hierarchy. It seems to them, as it will to many readers, that a happy childhood of belief was outgrown painfully as Catholics shook off many infantile bonds but surrendered security and many true and familiar charms. This is, then, a painful tale of growing up in a transforming church, a story with which many adult Catholics will identify.

''No Turning Back'' is, ironically, a compelling account of Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey's intellectual, spiritual and political growth, a growth made possible by the teachings, inspiration and educational facilities of the hierarchical Catholicism whose complacency they would ultimately challenge. The book's third function is as a specialized case history of the impotence and collapse of hierarchical structures that afflict the major institutions of our culture. The conflict portrayed in this book can be observed in large corporations, on university campuses and within the traditional professions. The hierarchical model, born 4,000 years ago when humans perceived the stars as lanterns in the houses of the gods, no longer functions well in the space age. The clash illustrated by this volume is one between leaders who believe that authority can only be expressed hierarchically and followers, workers, or communicants who no longer accept that as the divinely given pattern of reality. It is not genuine authority that is at stake, as this book illustrates, but its historical distortion into authoritarianism.

The authors probably weren't thinking of these larger purposes when they set out to tell their personal story. The power of great institutions withers, however, when ordinary people, such as Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, feel that their own experience of life is no longer reflected adequately by those whose interpretations of existence they had once gladly accepted. This is, therefore, a book to ponder for the implications of its core story. Prospective readers should be recruited from the temples and institutions of entertainment in which inane caricatures of nuns are still regularly employed. The latter are as childishly inappropriate as the notion of nuns as blindly obedient little girls, a view still held by some hierarchs. This remarkable book offers clear proof that a new age of women has dawned in the Roman Catholic Church. No matter what you hear, the aspirations of such women to participate more fully and equally in its ministry and structures will not easily be frustrated.

'WHAT I DID FOR LOVE'

In 1978 I was extremely wary about roommates. . . . As I let myself into the apartment, I felt the familiar sinking feeling - the sort of resignation Hercules must have felt when he entered the Augean stables. Then I noticed the place looked really nice. . . .

The kitchen door of my apartment and the commons apartment both opened onto the same back steps. We had the door open, to enjoy the early evening sounds of the end of summer, and eventually I heard someone dancing up and down the steps and singing, ''What I Did for Love.'' . . .

And in came Barbara Ferraro, a short little one-woman ''Chorus Line,'' and she rushed across the kitchen and threw her arms around me and said, ''Welcome to Chicago!''

Poor Barbara. Hugging me must have felt like hugging a mailbox. At that point in my life, I had decided that I was sick of having people hug and kiss me just because it was supposed to show warm feelings. . . . Barbara sort of recoiled from my stolid response to her greeting. . . . And for a minute we looked at each other. Oh my God, one of the crazy nuns, I thought. Oh my God, one of the nunny bunnies, she thought.